Verdi: Complete Ballet Music from the Operas

The only other serious competition in this repertoire, and it's not nearly as complete as this release (the Aida items are missing!), is an old Philips Due mostly conducted by the late Antonio de Almeida. Those are good performances, but they don't outclass these, either interpretively or sonically. You might say that it doesn't take much interpretive insight to conduct Italian ballet music, but ultimately the goal is always the same: to avoid boredom. This may be even harder in music whose purpose is largely decorative and expressively limited. It's to Serebrier's (and Verdi's) credit that there isn't a bar here that fails to entertain, or that doesn't make an excellent case for believing that this music is of much higher quality than its reputation suggests.